Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

EVENTS

Fischer: Gay marriage will result in sex with animals

According to the perennially-wrong Bryan Fischer, if you allow gay marriage, you’re literally slippery-sloping right into sex with animals. Apparently, the only thing keeping Fischer from having sex with animals is the continued oppression of gays, so whatever you do, either keep the laws barring homosexuals from having equal rights, or keep Fischer away from your livestock.

While I have the humanity to say that pedophiles should be helped to cope with their orientation such that they don’t harm children, I don’t have the temerity to say that there’s “nothing wrong” with that orientation. The fact that if they act on their orientation they hurt children, means we have to prevent them from acting on their orientation. It’s sad that someone could be born with a disorder that results in them hurting society, but we don’t say “murderous psychopaths are born that way and can’t be helped” and let them do their damage.

How any of this leads to zoophilia as a valid and supportable sexual orientation, I don’t know. Consider that the way you tell the difference between sexy fun times and sexual assault is informed consent. With that fact in mind, why might pedophilia (hebephilia) or zoophilia be societally-unsupportable paraphilias, where homosexuality is perfectly defensible?

It’s a rhetorical question with an obvious answer, but I suspect someone will come along and both ignore that question and answer, and the evidence Stephanie presented in the aforementioned post about hebephilia.

Fischer’s conflation of defensible and indefensible paraphilias is odious. But maybe he was born with a disorder that gives him sexual gratification for being bigoted, the religious motivation for his bigotry coming later.

Seriously, I’ve had a blog category for “gender” for a very long time, and that’s where all issues of gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation get thrown into. Sometimes, I make the conflation mentally when it shouldn’t be made. I’ve corrected that here. There should be an overarching word for all those things, but AFAIK, there isn’t. If there is, I’d change that category name to it in a heartbeat.

It’s sad that someone could be born with a disorder that results in them hurting society, but we don’t say “murderous psychopaths are born that way and can’t be helped” and let them do their damage.

That should be “could (probably is) developmentally influenced by a multitude of factors to become inclined to pedophilia”, not “born with”. This gross oversimplification has got to die sometime.

Also, don’t put discussions of pedophilia in juxtaposition with murderous psychopaths. (Or with rape, which happens so often that now pedophilia is considered synonymous with child rape, in large part due to the anxiety of conservatives in the media toward actually using the word ‘rape’.) That makes it seem like the two have something to do with each other. Most psychopaths (and sociopaths) are actually aware that what they are doing is wrong; they just don’t care. They shouldn’t be receiving any benefit of the doubt on whether killing is out of their control.

As to what Fischer said, well, he’s an authoritarian theocrat with borderline totalitarian tendencies. Any breaking of the established rules will be used in a slippery slope argument toward the destruction of all civilization. He (and many others in his camp) speak this hyperbole on a daily basis, because stoking fear is part of their modus operandi and a key factor in the control structure. It’s not surprising or intelligible enough to be noteworthy on its own anymore.